The Tate Crack

I thought it referred to someone named Tate and was a story about his crack. Maybe this bloke was displaying it in a manner that made a fashion statement, much like we did in the early 70’s when a bit of bum and a showing of whatever pubes we had peeking above the front of our jeans was a must.

But no, it is actually a 548 foot long, three foot deep, chasm that has been created in the floor of the Tate Gallery in London by artist Doris Salcedo at a cost of several hundred thousand pounds. I don’t pretend to understand art because it is always an individual experience. I can see the beauty in the layout of a comic drawn by Barry Windsor Smith but not necessarily in a work by Jackson Pollock.

Still there is probably some intrinsic value in a crack in the ground. Maybe Salcedo herself sums it up when she said ‘I began to conceive of works based on nothing’.

Apparently three women have already been injured, none seriously, by this work of nothing. Two tripped over it, one injuring a wrist and another fell into it when she thought it was an optical illusion. Funny the local Council here has just spent $100,000 repairing cracks to the brickwork in the basketball stadium I work in. I could have saved them some serious money if I’d known a little earlier about the Tate Crack.